Thursday, October 13, 2011
Another fine movie ensemble
By Edward Copeland
Sometimes a film's cast proves so damn good and likable and the underlying story interesting enough that you feel like giving the movie a pass even though it doesn't give you anything to rave about. Somehow, even when deep down you know the film doesn't deserve much praise, you feel that picking apart its weaknesses would be akin to kicking a puppy. Such is the case with writer-director Tom McCarthy's third film Win Win.
McCarthy, who previously made the overrated film The Station Agent and The Visitor with its great Oscar-nominated performance by Richard Jenkins, and who himself played the prevaricating reporting on the final season of The Wire, co-wrote the story for Win Win with Joe Tiboni. Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a lawyer with a struggling practice who also coaches a high school wrestling team part-time. One of his clients happens to be a fairly well off man named Leo (Burt Young) who has slipped into dementia in his later years and is estranged from his only daughter, his only living family.
The hearing is to decide whether the state should become his guardian, which would mean placing him in a nursing home. Mike, in theory, is only there to represent Leo's desire to stay in his own home, even though that's unlikely to be the ruling. Flaherty discovers that a guardian for Leo would receive a monthly stipend of $1,500 and at the last minute volunteers to be his guardian, saying that way Leo would be able to stay in his own home. Flaherty actually has no intention of doing such a thing, placing Leo in a nursing facility anyway and telling him that the judge ruled that is where he must stay, while Mike and his supremely odd pal Terry (Bobby Cannavale) plot what to do with the accumulated money they can raise off the old man.
You're off to a good start with a cast that features Giamatti, Young and Cannavale, but we're also rewarded by having Amy Ryan (fast becoming a national treasure) as Flaherty's no-nonsense wife Jackie. I think it took me a long time to recognize Ryan's greatness because I've yet to see her in two roles that seem alike whether it be Officer Beatrice Russell on The Wire, her Oscar-nominated turn as the drugged-out mom with the kidnapped daughter in Gone Baby Gone or last year's underrated Jack Goes Boating.
We aren't done with the acting riches yet — we've got Jeffrey Tambor as Flaherty's assistant wrestling coach, Melanie Lynskey as Young's estranged daughter who comes sniffing around when she thinks that there is money to be gained and even a brief appearance by recent Emmy winner Margo Martindale. Interestingly enough, with this big and strong an ensemble, the second most important part next to Giamatti's goes to a teen who has never acted before.
Alex Shaffer portrays Kyle, Leo's teenage grandson who runs away from his Ohio home with his mother (Lynskey) hoping to live with the grandfather he's never met. Instead, the Flahertys end up taking him in and Kyle also turns out to be a wrestling prodigy (in real life as well as the film). Even though what Mike does initially isn't ethical, he isn't a bad man. Win Win, for the most part, doesn't have heroes or villains, though Lynskey's Cindy doesn't get portrayed in the most positive of lights.
The problem with Win Win is that once it's over, even though it was watchable and the actors performed admirably or better, for the life of me I couldn't tell you what it is. It skews closest to the realm of comedy, not that I laughed that much. It never really bored me yet at no point did I feel invested in the characters' fates.
Ryan is excellent, Cannavale has some great screwy moments and for his first time acting, young Shaffer comes off pretty well. Giamatti, as nearly always, gives a good performance but I never forgot that I was watching Paul Giamatti. I wouldn't have minded more Tambor.
Win Win turns out to be a puzzlement. I imagine that years from now I'll flip past it on a TV channel, watch for a few minutes and then try to remember if I've seen the film before.
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Labels: 10s, Amy Ryan, Burt Young, Cannavale, Giamatti, Tambor, The Wire
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Friday, February 04, 2011
If you want to swim, you have to get in the water
By Edward Copeland
As great a city as it is and despite its large population, no city makes a single person feel more alone than New York. That's certainly the case for a middle-age limo driver named Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman, making his directing debut) in Jack Goes Boating.
Hoffman first played Jack off-Broadway with his theater troupe LAByrinth and the troupe's co-artistic director John Ortiz and actress Daphne Rubin-Vega re-create their stage roles in playwright Bob Glaudini's screen adaptation. Joining them for the movie version is the talented Amy Ryan, Oscar nominee for Gone Baby Gone and port police Officer Beatrice Russell on The Wire.
Jack's job as a limo driver comes courtesy of his uncle, who owns the company, and that's where he's developed a friendship with Clyde (Ortiz), a fun-loving, superconfident guy who is determined to change Jack's luck with women. Clyde's wife Lucy (Rubin-Vega) is similarly inspired to help find a match for Connie (Ryan), a co-worker at the funeral parlor where she works, so the spouses conspire to bring these lost, awkward souls together.
Connie, to put things mildly, can be a bit of a strange duck, with a run of bad luck, including being assaulted on the subway and being felt up by her boss. Ryan plays the part to eccentric perfection, especially at the film's climax when she must finally take charge of an unbearable situation at a dinner party.
Jack comes tailor-fit for Hoffman. He's a man not just uncomfortable in his own skin, but uncomfortable in skin in general, but he's determined to accomplish things such as learning to swim since Connie mentioned wanting to go boating when the weather's better. He also thinks that he should cook for her and Clyde gives him the name of a pastry chef he knows at the Waldorf Astoria, leaving out the fact that the man used to date Lucy years ago and Clyde still harbors bad feelings about it.
The action culminates with the big night when Jack prepares to unveil his new cooking skills at a dinner party for the two couples, only Clyde's drunken jealousy and a shared smoking of hashish turns things into a disaster. The four actors all turn in superb performances, particularly Ryan and Rubin-Vega when she finally gives Clyde the dressing down he deserves.
As a director, Hoffman shows some visual flair and, unless you knew ahead of time, it might not be readily apparent that Jack Goes Boating began life as a play and not just as a small indie.
It's not a great film, but its performers definitely make it worth seeing.
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Labels: 10s, Amy Ryan, P.S. Hoffman, The Wire
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Friday, November 20, 2009
A detective story with a beat you can't dance to
By Edward Copeland
In the history of cinema's odd performances, and I'm only referring to the ones that actually work such as Mickey Rourke in Barfly, you can now add Michael Shannon in the underseen and unusual excuse for a detective story called The Missing Person.
Shannon, whose two scenes in Revolutionary Road were so great he snagged a supporting actor Oscar nomination out of them, plays John Rosow, a private investigator and former New Yorker who is now based out of Chicago. He drinks a lot, but he doesn't seem like a drunk. In fact, he doesn't really seem as if he's from this planet with his air of permanent distraction and a sense that not much in life interests him at any given time, even the case he's being paid to work on.
Written and directed by Noah Buschel, The Missing Person lets the audience in on its secrets very slowly, yet this isn't a film that's preoccupied with twists. It seems as disinterested in letting us in on the story behind Rosow or the man he's following (Frank Wood) as Rosow does going about his day. The movie earned Buschel a prize as breakthrough director at the Gotham Independent Film awards and I can see why.
Shannon's performance, and the movie itself, could be off-putting in the early going, but if you relax and surf this film's unusual waves, it will ultimately prove rewarding, especially if you use Shannon as your guiding star. His eyes always seem to be focused elsewhere, yet you remain riveted on him. There's a scene late in the film where he's shot at a distance, standing in a hallway, beneath a bright overhead light. The character he's talking with thinks he's about to do something, but Shannon's performance is not a hair-trigger one and that's what makes it all the more interesting.
Warning: The next paragraph contains spoilers.
There is a reason for John Rosow's perpetual fog. The connection between Rosow and the man he is seeking is 9/11. Many films have touched on the subject since that tragic day in 2001, but more than a fair share came off as gimmicky and plot points placed just to push the audience buttons. That's not the case here. It's the first film I've seen that treats the event as a fact of life. While some aspects of what it caused characters to do may seem wrong or hurtful, it's the first film that so underplays it that it also comes from a place of emotional understanding.
Spoilers done. Resume reading.
Supporting Shannon's efforts in this most unusual journey are the aforementioned Wood, a very good actor that most people will recognize but probably not as many will know by name as they should. He won a Tony for his role in Warren Leight's Side Man and might be most familiar as Murray's mild-mannered co-worker at the New Zealand consulate on HBO's two-season wonder Flight of the Conchords.
A couple of other HBO veterans also come along for the ride. The great Amy Ryan (The Wire), who scored an Oscar nomination for her brilliance in Gone Baby Gone, plays someone involved in hiring Rosow and John Ventimiglia swaps his chef's hat as Artie Bucco on The Sopranos for a hack's license. There also are nice turns by Margaret Colin and Linda Emond.
Still, it's Buschel's screenplay and direction and Shannon's original performance that makes The Missing Person a keeper. It's a detective story where the real mystery is why the film didn't get more attention from critics when it was originally released because it certainly deserved it, if only to read the discussion it would have inevitably sparked.
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Labels: 00s, Amy Ryan, HBO, Michael Shannon, Mickey Rourke, The Sopranos, The Wire
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Everyone looks out his own window
By Edward Copeland
When Amy Ryan began her near clean sweep of the supporting actress awards for Gone Baby Gone, I was a little puzzled, since she is hardly a household name and the film itself seemed to have garnered little notice. Now that I've finally seen the film, I can see that Ryan's awards were more than justified and Ben Affleck's directing debut really hasn't been given the praise it richly deserves.
I feel ashamed of myself for not recognizing Ryan by name when she first started getting attention, since she plays Officer Beatrice Russell on the great HBO series The Wire (which I'm missing greatly, given that my evil cable company took HBO away from me and sent it to the digital ghetto). However, you won't find any trace of the hardworking single mom Beadie within the drug-addicted single mother of a kidnapping victim in Gone Baby Gone.
It's easy to see how Ryan's powerhouse work got notice, but the rest of her film and fellow actors deserve kudos as well. Adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the book Mystic River and is a writer on The Wire, Gone Baby Gone plays in some ways as if it's a sequel to Clint Eastwood's film, only Gone Baby Gone is much better.
Gone Baby Gone doesn't go on past the point where it shouldn't and, by and large, the Boston accents in Gone Baby Gone are done much better than in Mystic River.
Affleck taps his younger brother Casey as the lead here and it's not a case of nepotism run amok. Casey Affleck is quite good as Patrick Kenzie, a private investigator hired by the missing girl's aunt (Amy Madigan) (along with his girlfriend, played by Michele Monaghan) to help the police with their investigation.
Leading the investigation on the police side are too veteran detectives (Ed Harris and John Ashton) under the supervision of the police chief (Morgan Freeman), whose own child was lost long ago.
While it's hardly noteworthy to expect good work from Freeman, this is by far the best performance Harris has given in ages.
As a director, Ben Affleck moves the film along nicely, even though its complicated story would have been easy to muck up and end up confusing the viewer. Still, there is a reason Ryan has burst into the consciousness with her work here. She is superb.
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TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
When Amy Ryan began her near clean sweep of the supporting actress awards for Gone Baby Gone, I was a little puzzled, since she is hardly a household name and the film itself seemed to have garnered little notice. Now that I've finally seen the film, I can see that Ryan's awards were more than justified and Ben Affleck's directing debut really hasn't been given the praise it richly deserves.
I feel ashamed of myself for not recognizing Ryan by name when she first started getting attention, since she plays Officer Beatrice Russell on the great HBO series The Wire (which I'm missing greatly, given that my evil cable company took HBO away from me and sent it to the digital ghetto). However, you won't find any trace of the hardworking single mom Beadie within the drug-addicted single mother of a kidnapping victim in Gone Baby Gone.
It's easy to see how Ryan's powerhouse work got notice, but the rest of her film and fellow actors deserve kudos as well. Adapted from the novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the book Mystic River and is a writer on The Wire, Gone Baby Gone plays in some ways as if it's a sequel to Clint Eastwood's film, only Gone Baby Gone is much better.
Gone Baby Gone doesn't go on past the point where it shouldn't and, by and large, the Boston accents in Gone Baby Gone are done much better than in Mystic River.
Affleck taps his younger brother Casey as the lead here and it's not a case of nepotism run amok. Casey Affleck is quite good as Patrick Kenzie, a private investigator hired by the missing girl's aunt (Amy Madigan) (along with his girlfriend, played by Michele Monaghan) to help the police with their investigation.
Leading the investigation on the police side are too veteran detectives (Ed Harris and John Ashton) under the supervision of the police chief (Morgan Freeman), whose own child was lost long ago.
While it's hardly noteworthy to expect good work from Freeman, this is by far the best performance Harris has given in ages.
As a director, Ben Affleck moves the film along nicely, even though its complicated story would have been easy to muck up and end up confusing the viewer. Still, there is a reason Ryan has burst into the consciousness with her work here. She is superb.
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Labels: 00s, Amy Ryan, B. Affleck, C. Affleck, Eastwood, HBO, Morgan Freeman, The Wire
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Friday, November 09, 2007
The Devil's Reject
By Odienator
Quentin Tarantino can teach Sidney Lumet a thing or two about directing. And yes, my subject and object are in the proper places in that sentence. For better and worse, the short, meteoric rise of QT ushered in the still-active era of movies being told out of sequence, or in multiple and parallel flashbacks, for no reason whatsoever. Tarantino usually is able to pull it off because his direction embraces the fractured narrative, builds upon it and uses it to his full advantage. It's as if the film knows the flashbacks are coming or its sequence is out of order, and it adjusts accordingly without breaking its hold on the viewer. It doesn't announce FLASHBACK in giant capital letters. That's the lesson Sidney Lumet could learn from QT, because in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, whenever the amateurish screenplay decides to go backward, Lumet announces it with incredibly annoying Pokemon-style screen flashing. It tosses the viewer right out of the movie.
Sondheim wrote "you gotta have a gimmick" and while that always works for strippers, it doesn't always work for film. Lumet builds tension so carefully in some scenes that the sudden announcement of flashbacks let all the air out of the balloon. Compare this to his devastating use of flashbacks in The Pawnbroker. There is absolutely no reason for the story to be told in this fashion, outside of sheer laziness and the screenwriter's knowledge that his script, if told straight, would have been no different than 8,000 other scripts with this same story. Yet Lumet's direction is so good at times that I felt he could have made this work without the gimmicks. The screenplay would still be just as derivative and unbelievable, but we would have been too busy being strangled by suspense to notice. This film just doesn't build the way it should have. It stops and starts like a traffic light-ridden NASCAR race. The herky-jerky back and forth gives far too much time to contemplate the numerous questions that derail the film's hold on the viewer.
In the screenplay chapter of his must-read book, Making Movies, Lumet writes:
This is a very telling paragraph from Lumet. Is this film's construction a blatant attempt to stave off predictability without losing inevitability? And is this the reason why so many movies have flirted with the "off-balance" device of the non-linear gimmick? I really don't see much difference: if it's inevitable, then you can predict it's going to happen. This isn't as bad an idea as slowing down and hacking up your movie until the viewer can meditate on how illogical the story is.
Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the financially strapped eldest son of Charles (Albert Finney) and Nanette (Rosemary Harris). Between his drug addiction and his golddigger trophy wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei), Andy's wallet is screaming for help. To silence the noise, Andy has also been stealing money from payroll. Andy's younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) has money problems of his own: he can't pay his child support and his angry ex-wife Martha (Amy Ryan) is threatening him with court action. When he can't pay for his daughter's trip to The Lion King, he allows himself to be taken in by Andy's plan to help them both achieve hakuna matata. They decide to rob their Mom and Pop's Mom and Pop Jewelry Store — or rather, Andy decides Hank should do it — so that they can get quick cash and their parents can collect the insurance money that will result from the robbery. "It's a victimless crime," Andy says, using that bullying, manipulative manner we older brothers employ so well.
Of course, the robbery goes awry, and the primary reason for this is that Andy is, to use the film's love of the f-word, a fucking idiot. Hank's an idiot as well, but Andy knows not only this fact but also how wimpy Hank is in general. He assigns Hank the job, telling him to use a fake gun, and Hank instead gets a more hardened criminal (Brian F. O'Byrne from Frozen) to pull the job. Suffice it to say, the crime's not victimless, and O'Byrne winds up as dead as the victim he shoots in the heist.
As the brothers' world comes tumbling down, they make one inevitable mistake after another. They have to deal with Hank's ineptitude and Andy's horse addiction, their father's compulsive desire to find out who robbed his store and caused the carnage, the secrets that threaten to tear their fraternal love apart, and the women who drive them to do and say the darndest things. It sounds compelling, but the film's construction is far too distracting to be effective. And the questions that arise just nag at the viewer in the dark. Are these guys really in that much trouble that they need to resort to a jewelry heist? Why not Andy instead of wishy-washy Hank? How did Andy suddenly morph from Pillsbury Yuppie to Chuck Bronson? Why would Hank rent a car, effectively creating a paper trail, to do a robbery? If you have that much dope and dough in your house, wouldn't you have something besides a punk-ass revolver? Wouldn't an autopsy show that you smothered someone to death? Why steal from your job's payroll box when you know you're being audited? Why didn't the job call the cops on Andy? I could go on and on.
A film such as Before the Devil Knows You're Dead needs the kind of suspension of disbelief continuity of a film like To Catch a Thief or the film I wish this movie could have been: Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. On occasion, Lumet reaches for the greatness he is known for, which makes the film's overall failure even more frustrating. Watch how he visually constructs an outdoor scene between Hoffman and Finney. Just the placement of the characters alone speaks volumes, making the stilted dialogue that pollutes the scene completely unnecessary. Observe how he visually plays out the scenes that depict Hank's criminal seduction by Andy. The robbery itself has incredible tension and an almost existential visual quality; it's as mean and lean as the rest of the film thinks it is.
Lumet's biggest failures usually stem from a lousy script or miscast performers (I'm looking at you, Miss Ross, in The Wiz). Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has both. Until his last reel gunplay, which does not work at all, Hoffman is a credibly smarmy creature with daddy issues and a wife he (correctly) thinks is out of his league. Ethan Hawke is so woefully miscast that it's painful to watch him. Albert Finney is wasted, but Rosemary Harris is interesting and far more credible with a gun than her cinematic son. Michael Shannon leaves an impressive mark on his limited screen time, as does Amy Ryan, and O'Byrne brings an expert's menace to his sacrificial role that can be used as a measuring stick for the brothers' amateur night at the criminal Apollo.
Marisa Tomei's character is one note and should have been accompanied by Whodini's "I'm a Ho" every time she appeared on the screen. Her sole purpose in the film is to show the naked body far too many critics are panting over, as if they've never seen tits and ass before. These are the same critics who have the nerve to be offended by the sex scene between her and Hoffman that opens the film, as if his far-from perfect (yet oddly film critic-like) body ruins their Tomei spank-bank entry and offends their sensibilities. I saw it as a harbringer of the film's dysfunction: it's superbly shot and visually arresting, but the content of the scene itself is not worth watching. Interestingly enough, it's the one stand alone scene in the picture (i.e., we don't know where it fits in with the rest of the timeline, short of assuming it comes before the film's story). It also tells us everything we need to know about the characters without saying a word.
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Quentin Tarantino can teach Sidney Lumet a thing or two about directing. And yes, my subject and object are in the proper places in that sentence. For better and worse, the short, meteoric rise of QT ushered in the still-active era of movies being told out of sequence, or in multiple and parallel flashbacks, for no reason whatsoever. Tarantino usually is able to pull it off because his direction embraces the fractured narrative, builds upon it and uses it to his full advantage. It's as if the film knows the flashbacks are coming or its sequence is out of order, and it adjusts accordingly without breaking its hold on the viewer. It doesn't announce FLASHBACK in giant capital letters. That's the lesson Sidney Lumet could learn from QT, because in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, whenever the amateurish screenplay decides to go backward, Lumet announces it with incredibly annoying Pokemon-style screen flashing. It tosses the viewer right out of the movie.
Sondheim wrote "you gotta have a gimmick" and while that always works for strippers, it doesn't always work for film. Lumet builds tension so carefully in some scenes that the sudden announcement of flashbacks let all the air out of the balloon. Compare this to his devastating use of flashbacks in The Pawnbroker. There is absolutely no reason for the story to be told in this fashion, outside of sheer laziness and the screenwriter's knowledge that his script, if told straight, would have been no different than 8,000 other scripts with this same story. Yet Lumet's direction is so good at times that I felt he could have made this work without the gimmicks. The screenplay would still be just as derivative and unbelievable, but we would have been too busy being strangled by suspense to notice. This film just doesn't build the way it should have. It stops and starts like a traffic light-ridden NASCAR race. The herky-jerky back and forth gives far too much time to contemplate the numerous questions that derail the film's hold on the viewer.
In the screenplay chapter of his must-read book, Making Movies, Lumet writes:
"In a well made drama, I want to feel: 'Of course — that's where it was heading all along.' And yet the inevitability mustn't eliminate surprise. There's not much point in spending two hours on something that became clear in the first five minutes. Inevitability doesn't mean predictability. The script must still keep you off balance, keep you surprised, entertained, involved, and yet, when the denouement is reached, still give you the sense that the story had to turn out that way."
This is a very telling paragraph from Lumet. Is this film's construction a blatant attempt to stave off predictability without losing inevitability? And is this the reason why so many movies have flirted with the "off-balance" device of the non-linear gimmick? I really don't see much difference: if it's inevitable, then you can predict it's going to happen. This isn't as bad an idea as slowing down and hacking up your movie until the viewer can meditate on how illogical the story is.
Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the financially strapped eldest son of Charles (Albert Finney) and Nanette (Rosemary Harris). Between his drug addiction and his golddigger trophy wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei), Andy's wallet is screaming for help. To silence the noise, Andy has also been stealing money from payroll. Andy's younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) has money problems of his own: he can't pay his child support and his angry ex-wife Martha (Amy Ryan) is threatening him with court action. When he can't pay for his daughter's trip to The Lion King, he allows himself to be taken in by Andy's plan to help them both achieve hakuna matata. They decide to rob their Mom and Pop's Mom and Pop Jewelry Store — or rather, Andy decides Hank should do it — so that they can get quick cash and their parents can collect the insurance money that will result from the robbery. "It's a victimless crime," Andy says, using that bullying, manipulative manner we older brothers employ so well.
Of course, the robbery goes awry, and the primary reason for this is that Andy is, to use the film's love of the f-word, a fucking idiot. Hank's an idiot as well, but Andy knows not only this fact but also how wimpy Hank is in general. He assigns Hank the job, telling him to use a fake gun, and Hank instead gets a more hardened criminal (Brian F. O'Byrne from Frozen) to pull the job. Suffice it to say, the crime's not victimless, and O'Byrne winds up as dead as the victim he shoots in the heist.
As the brothers' world comes tumbling down, they make one inevitable mistake after another. They have to deal with Hank's ineptitude and Andy's horse addiction, their father's compulsive desire to find out who robbed his store and caused the carnage, the secrets that threaten to tear their fraternal love apart, and the women who drive them to do and say the darndest things. It sounds compelling, but the film's construction is far too distracting to be effective. And the questions that arise just nag at the viewer in the dark. Are these guys really in that much trouble that they need to resort to a jewelry heist? Why not Andy instead of wishy-washy Hank? How did Andy suddenly morph from Pillsbury Yuppie to Chuck Bronson? Why would Hank rent a car, effectively creating a paper trail, to do a robbery? If you have that much dope and dough in your house, wouldn't you have something besides a punk-ass revolver? Wouldn't an autopsy show that you smothered someone to death? Why steal from your job's payroll box when you know you're being audited? Why didn't the job call the cops on Andy? I could go on and on.
A film such as Before the Devil Knows You're Dead needs the kind of suspension of disbelief continuity of a film like To Catch a Thief or the film I wish this movie could have been: Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. On occasion, Lumet reaches for the greatness he is known for, which makes the film's overall failure even more frustrating. Watch how he visually constructs an outdoor scene between Hoffman and Finney. Just the placement of the characters alone speaks volumes, making the stilted dialogue that pollutes the scene completely unnecessary. Observe how he visually plays out the scenes that depict Hank's criminal seduction by Andy. The robbery itself has incredible tension and an almost existential visual quality; it's as mean and lean as the rest of the film thinks it is.
Lumet's biggest failures usually stem from a lousy script or miscast performers (I'm looking at you, Miss Ross, in The Wiz). Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has both. Until his last reel gunplay, which does not work at all, Hoffman is a credibly smarmy creature with daddy issues and a wife he (correctly) thinks is out of his league. Ethan Hawke is so woefully miscast that it's painful to watch him. Albert Finney is wasted, but Rosemary Harris is interesting and far more credible with a gun than her cinematic son. Michael Shannon leaves an impressive mark on his limited screen time, as does Amy Ryan, and O'Byrne brings an expert's menace to his sacrificial role that can be used as a measuring stick for the brothers' amateur night at the criminal Apollo.
Marisa Tomei's character is one note and should have been accompanied by Whodini's "I'm a Ho" every time she appeared on the screen. Her sole purpose in the film is to show the naked body far too many critics are panting over, as if they've never seen tits and ass before. These are the same critics who have the nerve to be offended by the sex scene between her and Hoffman that opens the film, as if his far-from perfect (yet oddly film critic-like) body ruins their Tomei spank-bank entry and offends their sensibilities. I saw it as a harbringer of the film's dysfunction: it's superbly shot and visually arresting, but the content of the scene itself is not worth watching. Interestingly enough, it's the one stand alone scene in the picture (i.e., we don't know where it fits in with the rest of the timeline, short of assuming it comes before the film's story). It also tells us everything we need to know about the characters without saying a word.
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Labels: 00s, Amy Ryan, Finney, Hawke, Lumet, Michael Shannon, P.S. Hoffman, Raimi, Sondheim, Tarantino, Tomei
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
The Wire Season 4: In Review
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This review of the entire season four of The Wire, so assume spoilers will be plentiful, so avert your eyes if you've missed anything and don't want to know about it.
By Edward Copeland
I’ve said it many times before (as have others), but I feel compelled to say it again as The Wire has wrapped up its fourth and perhaps finest season: This is less a television series than a novel you watch. It’s impossible to designate it as anything else.
This is not a show where you can come into the story late and still catch all the nuances. It’s not a great epiaodic series like The Sopranos or Deadwood, where you can judge one installment as superior to another. The Wire plays as one continuous episode that, as of now, runs about 50 hours long with one more episode of 13 hours or so yet to come. Because of the way The Wire works, it’s so much richer and fulfilling really than any other series I’ve ever seen. (Speaking of Deadwood, I hope everyone caught the great joke in "Final Grades," the season finale, the best HBO self-reference gag since The Sopranos' Uncle Junior mistook Larry David and Jeff Garlin on Curb Your Enthusiasm as himself and Bobby.)
Part of what makes it so great is that David Simon, Ed Burns and the rest of the behind-the-scenes masters behind The Wire never pander to the audience. Most shows make the effort to reach out to the viewer. The Wire makes the audience come to it and that degree of respect is nearly unheard of in series television, even on the best shows. On top of that, like the great epic novel that it is, The Wire keeps upping the ante by piling on more and more layers and keeping more and more plates spinning in the air without making any of
the multiple story strands seem extraneous. The same cannot be said of other series such as The Sopranos (Artie Bucco vs. Bennie, anyone?) or Deadwood (Maybe the theater subplot with Brian Cox would have paid off eventually, but I guess we probably will never know). It also has a great institutional memory: Bringing Wee-Bey (Hassan Johnson) back and immediately referencing his obsession with his fish. Just when you think the Season 2 port storyline was the rare arc that was finished after one season, it pops up again in Season 3 through the return of Beatrice Russell (Amy Ryan) and a Frank Sobotka poster and in Season 4 with Russell and McNulty’s continued relationship and the unexpected appearance of Spiros "Vondas" Vondopoulous (Paul Ben-Victor) in the season finale.As for Season 4 itself, I have relatively few criticisms of it. In the beginning, I thought that University of Maryland Professor David Parenti (Dan Deluca) was portrayed as a bit too naïve, but in the long run, that probably was accurate. To me, the only missteps The Wire made this season was that transformation of Michael (Tristan Wilds) into cold-blooded drug soldier seemed far too sudden. It made sense that he’d go to Marlo (Jamie Hector) to help him with his stepdad problem, but then to suddenly have him willingly beating up anyone in sight and having sex in a sleeping bag in his own place seemed more a side effect of time running out in the season than how fast Michael’s change would have taken place otherwise. The change seemed even more out of place when, out of nowhere, we see Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) dealing on the corners in the season finale. Nothing we’d seen in his character seemed to make that likely and it lessened the shocking effect it obviously was designed to produce.
Other than those quibbles, everything else seemed the best The Wire has ever produced. For me, it was particularly great to see the expansion of the great Robert F. Chew as Proposition Joe. What other show would have the guts to focus on four previously unknown teens in its fourth season and leave its ostensible lead (Dominic West) on the sidelines or absent most of the time. Kudos also to the casting of the quartet, especially Julito McCullum as Namond. It's worth noting, for those that don't know it, that Chew not only plays Prop Joe, he served as acting coach for the young actors. I don't know how much credit goes to him, but they all did well.
It also was refreshing to see Prez (Jim True-Frost), while often pivotal but always a background player, move to the forefront in his new role as a teacher. The rest of the returning cast were as great as always as were new additions such as Assistant Principal Donnelly (Tootsie Duvall), Norman (Reg Cathey), Chris and Snoop (Gbenga Akinnagbe and Felicia Pearson) and Namond's wonderful shrew of a mom De'Londa (Sandi McRee).
I have to admit that I've never been that attached to Bubbles (Andre Royo), but this season really served the character and the actor better than any before through his struggles with his tormentor and his inadvertent betrayal by the clueless Herc (Domenick Lombardozzi) who transformed from a lovable screwup into an infuriating screwup while his ex-partner Carver (Seth Gilliam) blossomed and matured without his influence. Most importantly though, Bubs grew on me by his desire to better Sherrod (Rashad Orange) by trying to get him back in school. At times, I wondered if they'd just dropped that strand as Sherrod vanished frequently, but the finally payoff for both Bubbles and the audience was truly heartbreaking. Kudos to Royo.
David Simon has commented before that he intends The Wire to be a portrait of a city more than a police procedural — and that has never been clearer than in Season 4. Hell, the series takes its title from the police’s electronic eavesdropping — and that wasn’t even a factor this year. In its 50 episodes,
it shows how bureaucratic nonsense not only keeps government and other institutions from functioning, it clamps down on hope as well, be it for the police, the politicians, port workers, educators or even drug dealers. This season, whose obvious focus was the teacher-student relationship of all kinds, also more subtly showing people either escaping or falling prey to their circumstances. The kids were the most obvious examples, but it extended to characters such as Herc, Carver and Carcetti as well. In fact, I wonder what path Carcetti will take — will his idealism be able to prevail or will he too fall prey to the lure of political reality. I eagerly await seeing what former journalist Simon has to say about how bureaucracies affect the media in Season 5. There's also one question that seems to be hanging out there, but only if you pay attention to the HBO Web site. Prop Joe's nepotism hire Cheese (Method Man) has his full name listed as Melvin Wagstaff, the same last name as teen entrepreneur Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell), but no concrete mention has been made of a connection between the two. (For the record, neither Wagstaff is related to the Wagstaff who contributes to this blog.)
Also, since each season seems to get around to killing off a long-running character, a moment of silence for poor Bodie (JD Williams), the coolest sideways spitter in the history of television. It’s amazing how much sympathy this show could create for a drug dealer who killed a teen in Season 1. One question though: When Season 5 rolls around, who is next on the target list? I have to wonder that since no police have died from anything other than natural causes, if one of their ranks might be in danger in the show’s final season. Only time will tell — and please don’t make us wait forever to watch this novel’s conclusion.
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Labels: Amy Ryan, Curb Your Enthusiasm, David Simon, Deadwood, HBO, Larry David, Television, The Wire
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Monday, September 25, 2006
The Wire No. 40: Home Rooms
BLOGGER'S NOTE: As always, know that spoilers lie below, so don't venture further unless you've seen the episode or don't care if you know what happens.
By Edward Copeland
School is back in session — and so is Omar. Oh, indeed. Keeping with The Wire's tradition of saving Omar (Michael K. Williams) until each season's third episode, the rip-and-run artist returns, complete with a new boyfriend and, in what I hope is not foreshadowing of his fate this season, living in a rowhouse apartment hidden behind one of those same plywood signs telling who to contact if there is a trapped animal — the same signs that Snoop and Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) hide Marlo's victims behind. In what has to be one of the funniest Omar scenes yet, he is distressed to find that he and his lover are out of his favorite cereal, so he ventures out in the street in his blue robe — unarmed — to the cries of neighborhood children shouting, "Omar's coming." Once he gets some cereal (not even the kind he wanted) and some smokes, he leans against a building only to have someone drop their drug stash to him unprovoked. You can see the disappointment in his eyes. His "job" is a game to him, and that takes all the fun out of it. As he tells his boyfriend, "It ain't what you takin', it's who you takin' it from." Later, when they pull off an actual score from a dealer working out of the same convenience store, he beams, "That's the reason we get up every morning."
Omar is not the only major character finally putting in an appearance this season. The now-retired Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom) returns as well. Since his exit from the Baltimore P.D., Colvin has been working security at a posh hotel, but once a cop, always a cop. When he insists on cuffing an influential businessman for roughing up a hooker, he soon finds himself unemployed again. However, opportunity comes his way again in the form of an academic at the University of Maryland School of Social Work who wants to use Colvin in a program aimed at saving kids from the thug life of the streets. The naive professor (played as being a bit too naive I thought by Dan DeLuca) originally suggests targeting youths between the ages of 18 and 22, not realizing that by that point, if they are in the game, they are long gone. An encounter with a hardened member of that age group soon changes his mind and while he still thinks high school, Bunny suggests going even younger and accepts the assignment, which will take place at Edward J. Tilghman Middle School, where Prez now is working as a math teacher. One of the episode's funniest moments comes when Assistant Principal Marcia Donnelly (Tootsie Duvall) braces herself for the opening of the school's doors for the school year, standing like a statue at the top of the stairs leading from the doors, pausing only long enough to cross herself. Prez's first day predictably is rough with his hard-to-control class, though Randy already makes nice with the teacher while he's palming a handful of hall passes so he can sneak out to other grades' lunch periods to hawk his snack foods. The real problem though comes from two of the girls, one of whom (and I wish I could find the actress's name) has one of the meanest glares I've ever seen. The class also includes Dukie, the object of much derision because of his "odor." It's not just the kids who are mean to Dukie either — when the three teens show up at Namond's house in the morning to go off to school together, Namond's mom refuses to let Dukie in. Dukie also provides one of the episode's most touching, quiet moments when after an act of violence in the class, he sits down on the floor next to the perpetrator and uses a battery-operated hand fan he found to cool her off before leaving it beside her as a gift. In one other school-related moment, we learn that McNulty didn't snag the binder for his own sons but for the children of Beatrice Russell (Amy Ryan), the port patrol officer from Season 2 whose doorstep McNulty showed up on at the end of Season 3.
Administrative changes are happening all over Baltimore, both on the streets and in the police department. Rawls lives up to his suggestion to Burrell and sends a hard-ass arrest-oriented officer, Lt. Charlie Marimow (Boris McGiver), to take over as head of the Major Crimes Unit. He even tries to sell the department switch to the retirement-obsessed former head as a promotion. Needless to say, Lester and Kima are not pleased and start immediately looking for their lifeboats, with Lester going first to homicide. Rawls — if he is to believed — tells Lester he actually respects his work, but not his gift for martyrdom. Kima seeks help from Daniels, who says she's too good to go back to the streets. Daniels asks Rawls to find a good spot for Kima, perhaps in homicide, but Rawls says he's just filled that vacancy before reconsidering and telling Daniels, "Let's see who I don't love no more." In the mayor's office, Herc finally is called into a post-fellatio meeting with Royce, who also has ordered his staff to play dirty with Carcetti, tearing down campaign signs, towing cars in front of his headquarters and sending work crews to tear up his sidewalk. Of course, neither Herc nor Royce acknowledge the true reason behind their meeting as Herc tells Royce about his low rank on the sergeant's list which Royce promises he can take care of, telling Herc that he's too good a policeman to be wasted on chauffeuring politicians around. (A sidenote: By pure happenstance, I caught a first season episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. I had forgotten that Bayless (Kyle Secor) had come to the homicide department from the mayor's security detail.)
On the street, which Bodie had to see coming, Marlo starts making noises that Bodie's lonely corner should belong to him so he should join Marlo's team or lose his spot. Bodie seeks help from his supplier, Slim Charles (Anwan Glover), the former Barksdale soldier who escaped the jail cell and now serves as Prop Joe's lieutenant. As Bodie laments the way things used to be, Slim reminds him, "The thing about the old days, they's the old days." Meanwhile, the drug co-op — the Baltimore drug equivalent of the five families in The Godfather meet to discuss an outside threat from New York interlopers — and how to get the independent-minded Marlo on their team, if only for the muscle he can provide.
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Labels: Amy Ryan, David Simon, HBO, The Wire, TV Recap
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